The annotation of media content through the generation of descriptive metadata having sufficient richness to characterize that media content has traditionally required the collaboration of human contributors with specialized knowledge. Although authoring tools enabling collaboration among such human contributors exist, those conventional tools are typically designed to passively process the inputs provided by each collaborator. Moreover, conventional authoring tools are typically specific to a certain type of media content. As a result, an annotation authoring tool designed to enable collaboration among annotators of movie content, for example, may be built around workflows that are unsuitable for use in annotating television programming content.
As the amount and variety of media content available to consumers continues to proliferate, the accuracy and efficiency with which that content can be annotated has become increasingly important. Consequently, there is a need in the art for an integrated annotation authoring solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple types of media content.